Fire hero Walter Powers doesn’t have time to pick up his medals, no matter how richly he deserves them.

So when his firehouse pals told the 11-year veteran – currently serving as a Marine lieutenant colonel in Iraq – that he’d been chosen for a top FDNY medal for saving a man in a Bronx blaze last year, he asked his wife and two sons to pick up the hardware in his honor.

“It’s so bittersweet he’s receiving it and he can’t be here,” said Julianne Powers, who will attend today’s FDNY Medal Day with her teenage sons, Nicholas and Sam. “The Medal Day is very special. I’m just sad for Wally that he can’t be here.”

Wally, as firefighter Powers is known to most, is in the middle of his third tour in Iraq. He’s been gone since January and won’t be back until next year.

The decorated military man, who saw action in the first Persian Gulf War and in Somalia, is a fireman by trade and a Marine by his sense of loyalty to the war on terror.

“It’s something I want to do, something I have a deep feeling about,” Powers, 41, told The Post from his base in Iraq’s Anbar Province.